Can't get CBS because you're a Time Warner customer? But you CAN!!!

I've been seeing tweets all day from people complaining how they missed their PGA golf because they can't get CBS.

Grrrrrr ...

Broadcast TV is free, boys and girls, and with the exception of the Pittsburgh market you should be pretty able to pick up the CBS network signal with your digital TV even without a digital antenna. I can in San Diego and I'm about 20 miles north of downtown.

(The Pittsburgh market covers a large swath of western PA and a lot of communities east of the city have trouble getting a signal because of the terrain.. Some of the earliest cable TV systems were started in the area, in fact.)

Digital antennas aren't very expensive, a good one can be found for under $40 at Radio Shack and a lot of online outlets. I found Mohu, a company that makes both indoor and outdoor HDTV digital antenna. One of their indoor antenna is pictured above. It's just a flat thing that looks like a mudflap that you either buy a holder for or mount on a wall.

There are others, too. You hook it up to your TV and then go through your TV's channel finding routine and you got all your broadcast channels in HD if you want and with their secondary signal channels as well, like Me-TV (playing classic TV reruns) for some CBS stations.

If you're a Consumer Reports subscriber you can click over to their site and see a review of some digital antenna. At this link.

Get one. Stop missing your shows.

Seth Rogen makes America proud as celebrity harrasser protester of Time Warner Cable

UPDATE: Not a harasser but a protester. Still finding the right language for all this, apologies. Seth is a TWC Customer and a fellow protester. 

Thank you Seth for your service to the cause. Readers, here's Seth's Twitter feed, scroll to see his Time Warner Cable protest tweets. Follow him, encourage him, he has more followers than we do.

Tweets by @Sethrogen

Carriage wars: Will anyone win this Time Warner v. CBS thing?

Sam Ro in Business Insider:

"While this appears to be a lose-lose in the near-term, UBS analyst John Janedis thinks it's worse for Time Warner than it is for CBS.

"'Our view continues to be that consumers have more loyalty to the content rather than the company which is responsible for distribution and with contracts often running 5+ years, CBS can’t afford to take below market value given the inability to renegotiate terms,' said Janedis in a research note today.

Indeed, cable subscribers pay Time Warner, not CBS, for the content.  So, it's understandable why consumers would direct their frustrations to the cable provider."

Of course there's another reason why Time Warner should lose support from the marketplace, it is them who have pulled the CBS Inc. content off their systems, CBS was more than happy to keep the stations on during negotiation.

You know who doesn't win? Us. We lose.

Are you missing PGA Championship this morning? Did Time Warner Cable pull you golf coverage?

Missing your golf this morning because you live in a city where Time Warner Cable has pulled the CBS-owned CBS station that's airing the PGA Championships? If you are ...

...YOU ARE A MORON.

Sorry, I had to say it. You needed the slap.

Folks, your TV probably gets your CBS station. You don't even have to unplug from the cable. Your TV's manual will give you all the details on doing such. If you're in one of these markets (Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Detroit) find your manual and perform the more-than-likely automatic process that will find your CBS station.

Don't be a moron. Broadcast television is free. It's always free. Despite what's going on here which is a fight over retransmission fees. There's a workaround. Do it.

Though I must say, I don't understand the fascination. The ball and the hole are so small, and it's so boring. 

CBS & Time Warner Cable carriage war fuels cut-the-cord commentary

This new version of the "blue screen of death" above is really pissing me off. How about you?

Lots of stuff in the press today about cord cutting, the business of cable television and the future.

Frank Rose at The New Yorker website:

"... the only way for cable companies to satisfy their customers is to embrace their dumb-pipeness. They need to focus on their broadband business, not their television business—the thing they’re capable of doing well, as opposed to the thing they keep messing up."

 And then later at his own blog Deep Media:

"They (the cable companies) really, really suck at providing it (television). For years, marketing experts have been telling them they need to build their brands by offering more and more services. The problem is, they can't manage the services they've got, and they probably never will."

At Broadcast Engineering, there are handy charts and some stats on customer loss for cable and satellite companies. At this link. And finally, from a while back but worth the read is Netflix' plan to replace broadcast television. They're doing pretty well so far.

Cutting the cord and negotiating cable event series

Broadchurch leads Olivia Colman and David Tennant

Quickly, because it's not the point of this post, let me just say Broadchurch episode one was solid, brilliantly acted (especially Olivia Colman) and sets up some great stuff for the remaining 7 stanzas on BBC America. I'd really like to know what was on that kid's computer that he deleted. And one more thing ... do you think American TV execs would ever choose two people who look like this to star in a series? This is why I love British TV, it's not about how hot you are but how hot your acting is, and these two have it in spades.

I love British TV so much in fact that the real hurt for me in cutting the cord will be BBC America and the other cable channels from IFC to Encore/Starz that license that content. This will require a shift in thinking.

I could buy Broadchurch on iTunes, of course. $20.99 for the eight episodes, making for a per episode cost of $2.62. For 42 minutes of content. A discount of 37 cents for buying the season pass. BTW, they're giving you the first one free if you want, just click here for that (limited time). And then of course I own the thing. Forever. Not that rewatching a crime drama is really a thing, you do already know who did it.

I could acquire one of those UK expatriate browser add-ons that I see advertised and watch it on ITV's catch up service, they're rent it to you for 1.29 UK, two bucks American. I'm not gonna try it, though. Not yet.

Of course, you could always torrent the sucker, but that's really a last resort that I wouldn't use unless, for example, you're Olivia Colman's American cousin and you can justify it with some higher calling to family pride or whatever. Pirating is illegal.

There is something else you can do, though, and it's FREE! It's difficult, though. Are you ready?

Decide not to care.

Yes, you gotta decide not to care. You don't have to be first and you don't have to watch it at the same time as everyone else. You can watch it when it goes to DVD sometime right after the final episode airs. You can watch OTHER shows. Other crime dramas. Other British dramas. Other shows that star David Tennant.

Here's a bunch of examples:

Tennant and another co-star, Doctor Who's Billie Piper

Crime dramas: Your broadcast network shows are still being broadcast! Surprise! Just ask your newfangled never-had-an-aerial-and-doesn't-even-know-what-that-is TV to search for broadcast channels. Check your TV's manual.

David Tennant: There's always some Doctor Who episodes to watch. That's where I met him. Netflix and Amazon Prime and iTunes has them, as well as DVD and Blu-Ray.

British Dramas: Netflix and Hulu are your friends in this regard. Netflix has 41 British TV dramas just waiting for you, including Luther with Idris Elba which is also a great crime drama.

Even if you bought Broadchurch from iTunes you would still be spending less for it, Hulu, Netflix and a broadband connection than you would paying the behemoth cable operators to deliver programming that interrupts you with commercials and costs a fortune.

Time Warner Cable, don't screw with my TV. I WILL cut you.

Sometimes good things come of bad things.

It's day five of CBS Inc. vs. Time Warner Cable. Haven't had any of the gazillion Showtime channels, lost the Smithsonian Channel too, and I didn't even realize CBS served them up.

(Now I understand why Tom Cavanaugh did all that stuff for them, he's probably working off his Love Monkey contract. Yes, I know it doesn't work like that. Yes, I would have liked to see where that show went. No, I don't know what Tom is doing now.)

Missed Ray Donovan on Saturday. Not that I'm current, I have three episodes on the DVR yet to watch. The DVR's a bit of an issue right now, also, it seems to be stopping recording stuff after a time and you have to reboot the thing to fix it. Gotta watch those (and all of Downton Abbey series three) before I turn it in for new hardware, if I do at all, Time Warner Cable you bastards.

You see, the thing is ... CBS is more than happy to have Time Warner continue to feed the channels to their subscribers, but Time Warner has pulled them in an effort to affect negotiation. Apparently CBS Inc. loses $400,000 a day in fees from us because of this. Of course CBS lost probably 20 times that just airing a Rob Schneider sitcom a few times so I don't know how that's a punishment. $400K a day for a corporation the size of CBS is a dime clinking around your washing machine.

So yeah, I'm pissed at my cable company. And I'm doing something about it. And I'm activating this blog again.

I already have a Roku 2, but I also got a Google Chromecast this week. Roku didn't support YouTube and a guy's gotta see his very well shot amateur videos from the Comic-Con panels so that wasn't gonna do. Chromecast is fine, but for a guy like me who doesn't opt for a smartphone in his life (I'm a much better person for it, not judging you) it means operating the thing from my laptop, which means carrying that around the house.

The loser here is Samsung. I bought a Samsung Smart Blu-Ray player hoping it would handle all this but the YouTube interface fails constantly and they decided NOT to update the Smart Blu-Ray for HBOGo, just the higher priced TVs. Boooo!

I know ... White people problems.

So, for the next few weeks I'll be trying out this cord cutting thing without actually cutting yet. Trial run. Test. And if you want you can follow along. I'll update on Twitter too (@JoeWatchesTV) and of course I'll be complaining to every one of my Facebook friends along the way.

Don't screw with my TV. I will cut you.